I would like in this chapter to reprise, or to take up again, the question of V. Y. Mudimbe's ‘deconstruction’, but more precisely in light of his own postcolonial inflection of the term reprendre, as a question of rereading and rewriting (both Africa and the West). He uses the term reprendre, in relation to contemporary African art, to mean both the act of coming back to something that has been interrupted (literally re-prendre) and the assessment of the ‘tools’ at our disposal, but also to signify a third, interstitial critical reflection between these two meanings:

I will take this definition of contemporary African art as emblematic of African cultural practices generally, thus translating reprendre into ‘rewriting’ in a very broad sense. I will also propose it as a kind of allegory of Mudimbe's careful genealogical teasing out of the multifarious ‘inventions of Africa’, as well as of his own ‘reinvention’ of Africa, through his theoretical texts, his polemical interventions, his poetry, and his novel writing. This allegorical reading of reprendre, which allows us to double back onto Mudimbe's texts themselves, appears to confirm the commonly held view that Mudimbe cannot escape the circularity of a certain ‘dependence’ on Western theory (in particular the work of Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, but also Jacques Derrida).